On Poetry Reviews: Ethos

A recent Publisher's Weekly article regarding poetry reviews is making the rounds. In it, Craig Teicher asks of poetry reviews in general (and negative ones in particular), “What is the point?” Is it sales? Is it humanity, or posterity? He writes:

“I’ve been reviewing poetry for a number of years and I’m constantly asking myself these questions. As PW’s poetry reviews editor for the past four years, I’ve mostly seen my job as an ambassadorial one: I want to help bookstore buyers and interested readers figure out which poetry books to stock or buy. But I’m also a freelance reviewer for many publications, from general interest magazines like Time Out New York, where I can’t count on a poetry savvy audience, to journals like Boston Review, where I expect a highly literate reader who knows a bit about poetry. When I write for the former, I tend to explain what’s going on in a book of poems, in hopes that a reader skeptical of poetry might be swayed to buy it. I tend not to write about books I don’t think well of for general interest magazines. But when I write for the poetry-literate reader, I know I can dig a bit deeper and feel free to make the kinds of criticisms that poets will take seriously.”

In explaining his own role (how often does a question of this sort, a systemic question, fall to those whose opinions are bound up by their own experience?), Teicher I think too-gingerly slips across the real rub of the poetry dilemma: “a highly literate reader” today only “knows a bit about poetry.” The majority of the reading public are not just sadly ignorant of poetry, but their ignorance makes them downright afraid of it. To these readers, poetry is as opaque and intimidating as the French language. It stems from a flaw in our pedagogy, the way we too-often teach in school that the point of literature is its summary — what cannot be summarized can be neither understood nor enjoyed. A critic must un-school them, in that sense.

In my welcome letter to The Critical Flame, I wrote that the focus of that journal would be stimulative; would be inflammatory; that it would be primarily educational: “the heart of our continued education is a public discourse that is free from small-minded influence, sanitation for the sake of weak wills, and cowardly censorship. With that in mind, we at The Critical Flame seek to clear a space in this wilderness that is the internet for articulate discussion and learned debate. We will make our convictions vulnerable to scrutiny, put aside our petty egotism, and engage with literature honestly, openly.”

That type of engagement can come in many forms — reviews of single volumes, articles on poets and careers, critical essays on forms and styles, etc. — but it must, must, must be sustained in order to be effective, in order to lead readers out of the cave of summarization and allegory. I feel strongly that a 300-word review educates no one; it bears the same relation to literature that a bumper sticker does to politics. It is a sales pitch, at best. A book report. This is not to say that length is itself a virtue: a 3000-word must justify the attention it requires of a reader, else it becomes nothing but an exercise in the critic's own aggrandizement. Still, I would much prefer seeing a critic try and fail at true engagement with the work.

I believe the point of reviews in general is to continue some form of education; not didactic as it was in school, but dialogical as it was in the Forum. A review or essay or critique ought to be the beginning of a shared and ongoing conversation regarding literature, poetry, and all that comes with it. This is the reason I feel that, despite their sometimes glaring flaws and failures, William Logan and Ron Silliman are two of the most effective poetry critics working today: when they write, people generally respond (often angrily); when they make claims, people discuss; when they make judgments, people debate.

That right there is the point: it's sharp, and incites a reaction.

Kirsch & Kaminsky on Poetry in Translation

At The Poetry Foundation website, poet / critic Adam Kirsch and poet / translator Ilya Kaminsky discuss the nature of, problems with, and possibilities for poetry in translation. They raise the common questions: how can one effectively translate formal techniques? is translation more re-imagining than transmogrification? what role does the personality of the translator play? These questions are fairly banal — they exist more for the critics to opine than as real practical problems for a translator. This is not to say that translators don't encounter them in their work. They do. But if a translator's approach is as programmatic as any answer, then they've almost certainly failed. As Kaminsky writes, ‘what interests me is not only the genius of the poet translated but also the genius of what is possible in English as it bends to accommodate or digest various new forms. By translating, we learn how the limits of our minds can be stretched to absorb the foreign, and how thereby we are able to make our language beautiful in a new way.’

Post Script
I agree with this aside whole-heartedly: ‘A side note about irony, which is a very popular device in American poetry today: I think when someone like Herbert used it in Poland in the time of martial law, when saying something straightforwardly meant being killed, it was a powerful thing. But when I see a thirty-something in Manhattan writing poems that are so overtly ironic they remind me of Seinfeld, I wonder if there is an overuse of this device in the work of our contemporaries.’

The Sure Thing: Betting Against Obama

‘Those shorting the Obama candidacy got crushed. And since January 2009, so, too, have those who have shorted the Obama presidency—especially the performance of the markets and economy under Obama. The same Republican politicians and economic pundits who (wrongly) said Bill Clinton's 1993 budget would destroy the economy and the stock markets, and who (wrongly) said President Bush's tax cuts would usher in an era of endless prosperity and wonderful market performance, warned again that the presence of a Democrat in the White House would spell doom for the Dow.

Here's a two-year chart of the S&P 500; if you shorted the market after the election, or after the inauguration, you've lost money. And if you shorted in March 2009, after the passage of the stimulus package, when Stanford economist Michael Boskin penned the foolish op-ed in the Wall Street Journal with the headline's "Obama's Radicalism is Killing the Dow," you'd really be feeling some pain. The S&P 500 is up 72 percent since then.

The shorting of the economy's performance under Obama wasn't limited to the ideologues who populate the Journal's editorial page. Economist forecasters have also effectively shorted Obama, arguing that the economy would not respond to the stimulus and other efforts. In the second quarter of 2009, economic forecasters surveyed by the Philadelphia Fed said the economy would grow at a 0.4 percent rate in the third quarter of 2009 and a 1.7 percent rate in the fourth quarter of 2009. The reality: The economy grew at a 2.2 percent rate in the third quarter (more than five times the rate they projected) and at 5.9 percent in the fourth quarter (more than three times the rate they projected). Oh, and if you shorted the dollar on the grounds Obama's policies would debase our currency, you've lost money, too.’

Read the rest at Slate

Let’s Do Lunch

Daniel E. Pritchard: Rev Your Writer’s Engine
Tuesday, March 30th
12:30 PM — 1:15 PM
Grub Street's Brown Bag Lunch Series
Do you work downtown and want to fit some writing into your day? Or do you have a schedule that gives you free afternoons instead of evenings? Bring your lunch and come on over to Grub Street for a Brown Bag Writing Workshop – a series recently profiled in the Boston Globe. For 45 minutes, you’ll meet fellow writers and get your creative juices flowing with some cool writing exercises. Led by the inimitable Dan Pritchard. Best of all, you’ll leave lunch with some new ideas to ponder for the rest of your day and beyond. No need to reserve a spot; just come to 160 Boylston Street, 4th Floor.
FREE, Grub Street HQ, 160 Boylston Street, Boston, MA

You Could Hear a Pnin Drop. . .

it's been so quiet around here. I know. Work has been particularly stressful, I was at a [really fantastic] wedding last weekend, The Critical Flame came out, it was my birthday this week, my grandmother's basement flooded, etc. I'm beat. On top of that, I honestly just haven't felt compelled to write here. What else is there? If I were gagging to write, I would do so regardless of life.

I just finished Empire of the Word: a Language History of the World, which was full of data on languages about which I previously knew nothing — but with such piecemeal evidence at hand for the living existence of so many ancient languages, the analysis / narrative history of those languages remains mostly speculative. That was a bit disappointing. The section on nahuatl (the language of the Aztec) was enlightening tho. Since then, I've moved on to a selected edition of Celan's poetry and prose. At the bookstore today I picked up used copies of Pnin, the Viking critical edition of White Noise, and a selection of Anna Akhmatova's poetry that has an introduction by Brodsky.

Event! Four Stories :: March 22

Tara Masih, Ethan Gilsdorf, Ladette Randolph, and Jeff Talarigo
will be reading their work at
Four Stories Boston
on March 22, 2010
7:00—9:00 pm
The Enormous Room *
Central Square, Cambridge

* the room is not, as one would suppose it to be, enormous — do arrive early

I highly recommend getting yourself up and out in the lamb's end of March to deep, dark Central Square for this Four Stories event — maybe the best reading series in the city. My good friend Tara Masih will be reading from her brilliant collection of short stories, Where the Dog Star Never Glows (pictured left, from Press 53). Also appearing are Ethan Gilsdorf, a great ballplayer and a heck of a writer, and Ladette Randolph of the ever-excellent Ploughshares.

Education Reform & Charter Schools

“The data, as Ravitch says, disappoints on other fronts, too—not least in failing to confirm high hopes for charter schools, whose freedom from union rules was supposed to make them success stories. To the shock of many (including Ravitch), they haven't been. And this isn't just according to researchers sympathetic to labor. A 2003 national study by the Department of Education (under George W. Bush) found that charter schools performed, on average, no better than traditional public schools. (The study was initially suppressed because it hadn't reached the desired conclusions.) Another study by two Stanford economists, financed by the Walton Family and Eli and Edythe Broad foundations (staunch charter supporters), involved an enormous sample, 70 percent of all charter students. It found that an astonishing 83 percent of charter schools were either no better or actually worse than traditional public schools serving similar populations. Indeed, the authors concluded that bad charter schools outnumber good ones by a ratio of roughly 2 to 1.”

—Sara Mosle, Slate

James Stotts on Jim Harrison’s “In Search of Small Gods”

Today I highly recommend poet, translator, and critic James Stotts’ fine long review of Jim Harrison’ In Search of Small Gods. Stotts engages with what he views as an Orphic, Romantic tradition at work in Harrison's poetry, where “Formalities are often set aside for eclectics — and Jim Harrison is a practitioner of eclectics.” He writes:

“In assuming this Adamic task of naming things, Harrison admits to being an inveterate bungler, one who can never be trusted with the names of creatures, the objects of gods’ creation. This collection is animated by an alternative religion of humility, which matches the myths of origin with an ethics of mistaken identities, where faces are water, where mortality is liquid, where birds and Volkswagens are confused and conflated. Harrison has remarked before on the distinction between his novels and poems: attempts at making sense, and at disturbing it, respectively. Poetry is music, in the sense that it comes as inspiration, and falls down on one, and as such it must be approached like a trauma.”

You can read the rest of this review at The Critical Flame.

I also recommend James' blog, The Fugue Aesthetics; and I suggest you track down a copy of the newly-published literary journal Little Star, which features (among such titans as Walcott, Delaney, and Heaney) a prominent selection of Stott's own poetry.

As Noted in Arts & Letters Daily

Since it was linked at AL Daily, today seems to be the day to check out Jacob A. Bennett's review of The Us, by Joan Houlihan, at The Critical Flame. To wit: ‘The choice of the poet to employ the objective personal pronoun — “us” — instead of the subjective — “we” — is the first of many (mis)appropriations that may sound funny to ears accustomed to standard English, but which signal a significant, deliberate shift away from contemporary idiom. The “I” of so many confessional poems is instead represented as “ay,” the self's capitalized, almost iconic name for itself reduced to mere phonological utterance.’

Read the whole review, and browse the rest of the issue, at The Critical Flame.

Nota Bene: Les Murray

“ ‘Now’ is what's obsolete in twenty years. You've got to watch that. You look for timeliness if you can reach it, but only occasionally do you reach it. I look back at my work now and sometimes think: That one is going to look dated for a while, but if it survives us all, eventually it'll be okay. Other poems you think are probably free of datedness, but you can never completely see that in advance.”

— Les Murray, in an interview at Image Magazine

Critical Flame :: Issue 6, March—April 2010

For Immediate Release,
THE CRITICAL FLAME
Volume 1, Issue 6 :: March—April 2010

ON NONFICTION

Katherine A. Evans on Natasha Walter’s Living Dolls: the Return of Sexism
“It is symptomatic of the cultural shift that inspired Walter to write Living Dolls that Cara’s story is not particularly unusual. A feminist rhetoric of choice, Walter argues, has been seized by Britain’s overly sexualized society and is being used to justify cultural trends that undo years of work by women’s activists.”

ON VERSE

Henry Gould on the poetry of Gabriel Gudding
“If I were foolish enough (and I am) to try to characterize that milieu, I would say we live in a time of near-systemic obfuscation — political, economic, educational — amid which the sphere of poetry hovers with an air of insouciant and facetious cleverness. Poetry per se has evolved, it seems, into light verse: an occasion for admirable displays of a poet’s intellectual graces (wit, charm, technical facility, humor, thoughtfulness, etc.).”

James Stotts reviews Jim Harrison’s In Search of Small Gods
“This collection is animated by an alternative religion of humility, which matches the myths of origin with an ethics of mistaken identities, where faces are water, where mortality is liquid, where birds and Volkswagens are confused and conflated. Harrison has remarked before on the distinction between his novels and poems: attempts at making sense, and at disturbing it, respectively.”

Jacob A. Bennett reviews Joan Houlihan’s The Us
“Twisting syntax and the abuse of grammar are a poet's prerogative, but these techiques are also always a game of roulette: the lines may clunk through such contrivance, or the wonder of novelty fade.”

ON FICTION

Jonathan Wooding reviews Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey
“With The Lost Books of the Odyssey, Zachary Mason has created an environment to showcase his extraordinary talent for cleverness; but he also demonstrates that relying on talent makes for a hollow achievement.”

Bernstein & Trash Day: a Venn Diagram in Prose

I received the selected Charles Bernstein in the mail recently, entitled All the Whiskey in Heaven, and I've been reading it because he is one of those writers who I had never heard about but then suddenly couldn't stop hearing about no matter where I went. Reading the book is slightly off-putting because I knew some things about him — job history, interests, etc. — so coming to the poems now is like meeting a person you hear stories about but have never actually met and they don't look right because they don't look the way you imagined: their hair is too long or too thin; the eyes a little offset, and brown (not blue, brown). Anyhow, you get the idea. But as I spend more time with the poetry, like getting to know this distant acquaintance, you start to see what others saw before you. Stories begin to make sense.

If you were to tell me everything about Charles Bernstein excepting his poetics, I'd develop an immediate and dire intellectual crush. He wants to get poetry into people's hands, good interesting challenging poetry, and believes that people are not dumb (or rather, only are as dumb as we pretend they are) — check, check, and check. He believes in the useful power of the internet and new media; he supports small press projects; he has a degree in philosophy — magnifico. He enjoys a good (or bad) pun and writes dense, humor-tinged essays — peaches. He even knows Jon Lovitz!

Yet . . . and yet. Something there is that does not love a Bernstein. Not personally, mind you — I don't know the man. I'm just really struggling to enjoy or meaningfully engage his poetry. At least for now. There are poets whose work pushes me forward, pulls me down in to it, and the language sinks and stays in me. Then, there are poets whose work I travel through as if on an arduous errand. I'm finding CB of that latter variety. I'm just taking out the trash; if I don't, the kitchen will smell. Despite the obvious intellect and humor, I am finding these poems to be a chore.

Why? I read a few essays and interviews for some helpful tools, enlightening references, the right imaginative lubricant — little in the way of hay was made. Bernstein quips, in “Against National Poetry Month As Such,” that during an imagined anti-poetry month, newspapers will print ads that read, “Go ahead, don't read any poetry. // You won't be able to understand it anyway: / the best stuff is all over your head.” Get it? They unwittingly printed a poem! For anti-poetry month! Oh, the irony. It isn't really over my head at all, because I get it. What fools! I'm in the know, which is half the battle. Go Joe!

But then, I actually do agree with most of what he writes, or at least the vein of his intentions. For example, in a 1999 interview he said, “we are now in the frightening Orwellian situation where complexity and the aesthetic is identified as ‘elitist’. This is for me tantamount to saying that ethics is elitist and only consumerism is democratic.” This is indeed a horrifying thought, and not just for a Crimson. He says, “the world is colored by our words, shaped by our grammar, valued by our metaphors,” but I feel little of this engagement in his work, little of this world-shifting language power. The language just runs through me.

But, with much hope for greater connection, or at least some excitement, be they intellectual or imaginative, I'll keep reading. Put it down for a while. Come back to it. See what I see then. I've had Ah Ha! moments before.

E-Book Pricing @ the Times

As has been widely noted already by various parties; dissected, discussed, and digested: Motoko Rich at The New York Times has provided a convenient chart regarding e-book costs and publisher profit. She points out that a publisher can make as much profit for an e-book sale as they would for a hardcover, but with a much smaller investment. Sounds like someone has been reading The Wooden Spoon!

I'm not saying I scooped the New York Times. I'm just saying that I reported this model long before they did, and Merriam Webster might say it was a scoop. Don't blame me. It's Merriam Webster they should be worried about.